October 25th, 2019

Finding time for career planning

The biggest barrier anyone we see at Medical Forum has when thinking seriously about the trajectory of their career is without any doubt "time".

Without time for reflection - properly allocated and.... preserved - it is hard for anyone to make genuine progress.

The second barrier is fear. Of?  Having to face things that perhaps one has been in denial about or which feel insurmountable.

The third barrier is structure - or rather lack of it. The process of reevaluating a career has various stages to it and if one launches in at the wrong stage without having done the preparation first - it is very easy to default back to take no action mode. When early forays into career development are unsupported and don't work out it is all too easy for the individual to give up at that stage and revert to tolerating an unsatisfactory situation. From here - it can only be a few steps away from chronic career disillusionment syndrome and possibly burnout too.

As a way of getting around these barriers - one of the first things we do is a preliminary phone call (after one of our questionnaires is completed) to assess whether burnout is present, whether no time is currently available for career planning and if the latter is true - how to engineer this into place. Where fear is present - we have an ebook which helps to turn that frightening uncertainty around into something more proactive... learning about how to culture the right attitude to career planning from a position of being extremely wary of it.

It is in fact all about putting some structure into the amorphous and at times overwhelming mass ( or mess) that career planning can feel like as well as making you feel supported.